HARVARD GAZETTE ARCHIVES

Massachusetts Secretary of Environmental Affairs Ellen Roy Herzfelder talks at the Kennedy School about a management plan for state waters. (Staff photos Jon Chase/Harvard News Office)

Herzfelder spoke at the John F. Kennedy School of Government's Taubman building during an event co-sponsored by the Kennedy School's Rappaport Institute for Greater Boston and by the Harvard University Center for the Environment. Rappaport Institute Executive Director David Luberoff moderated the event.

Center for the Environment Faculty Director Daniel Schrag, professor of earth and planetary sciences, commented on Herzfelder's presentation and said it was important for any plan to both recognize the degraded state of today's oceans and to have their improvement as a goal.

"Let's not be satisfied with maintaining the current state [of the ocean]," Schrag said. "The current state is very, very broken."

Center for the Environment Faculty Director Daniel Schrag, professor of earth and planetary sciences, responds to Herzfelder's presentation.

The seas off the Massachusetts coast have historically been important to the state, Herzfelder said. The legislation was prompted by the onslaught of conflicting development proposals and uses, from shipping lanes to power generation to sand mining for beach replenishment.

Massachusetts state waters extend three miles from shore and Herzfelder likened the current development process to the "wild west" where developers plant their flag in a particular spot, propose a use and then go through an approval process. That approval process, Herzfelder said, is all too often conducted in ignorance of the environmental characteristics of an area because data about the ocean real estate are sparse.

"We're kind of flying blindly into the future," Herzfelder said. "We have ocean sprawl; we don't have ocean zoning."

The legislation, filed by Gov. Mitt Romney on March 18, would create a two-year planning process that would result in a plan that would be executed mainly through existing authorities. The proposal would put a scientific data-gathering structure in place, allow routine near-shore development, and exempt highly regulated industries, such as fishing and shipping, from its provisions.

Schrag said that it is important to look at the ocean's health from a historical perspective. If viewed through the lens of recent decades, one gets an entirely different sense of the ocean's health than if one considers the bounty of a few centuries ago, when the average cod was a meter long, an estimated 2 million sea turtles swam in the Caribbean, and when enough whales swam the seas to build an industry around harvesting whale oil to light lamps.

"This is a decimated remnant of what was a healthy ocean," Schrag said.

Schrag said there is cause for optimism, however. The ocean has proven itself resilient and able to recover if given a chance. Management plans like the one being considered in Massachusetts may be a vehicle to regulate development and encourage recovery.

Schrag said he hoped the state would tap the intellectual resources of area colleges and universities, and he applauded the legislation's provisions to collect data about the coastal seas.

"In the absence of data, there's a lot of ideology being thrown around," Schrag said.

alvin_powell@harvard.edu

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